Election '84: The Shaping of the Presidency 1984

(3 of 12)

them. On the Democratic side, they first found Gary Hart, who drew almost as many popular votes as the ultimate nominee, Walter Mondale. Hart roweled Mondale from end to end of the country, leaving the Democratic candidate wounded and bleeding. On the Republican side, surfacing later, were half a dozen baby boomers who wrote the Republican platform to their wishes and who regarded Reagan, as one of them said, "more as a totem than a leader. We're trying to elect a man ten years past his prime."

Listen to two young men of the baby-boom generation. "The revolution is already happening in our party," said a key campaign manager for Reagan-Bush. "Our new men are on the way. The Jack Kemps, Trent Letts, Newt Gingrichs, Vin Webers may not make it to the top in 1988. But we'll be in control. The Bob Doles, the Howard Bakers are out—through. Unless George Bush makes it, we'll elect the first President who wasn't in uniform in World War II." The second baby boomer, liberal Democratic Congressman Charles Schumer of New York City (age 33), had done his best for Hart in the primaries and, ruefully looking back, said, "The tectonic plates of American politics are shifting. Gary Hart touched them, felt them, but he couldn't shape them. We have other men coming: Gore of Tennessee, Dodd of Connecticut, Gephardt of Missouri, Bradley in New Jersey—and Cuomo, of course."

The young men and women—between 28 and 38—on both sides were the field commanders of the campaign of 1984. They are the takeover generation. They were frustrated this year by men with older visions of America. But within months they will be fully operational. And they are beginning their own strike for power, with fresh values, fresh purposes, right now, this week.

If the generation gap surfaced first in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, the next surge, surfacing in New York in April, was of an entirely different nature. It attached itself to the name of Jesse Jackson.

It was always difficult to distinguish between Jesse Jackson and what he stood for. The eloquent young man was a master politician—part preacher, part insurrectionary, part visionary, part hater. Tainted now, however, by racists whom he refused to repudiate, he ran not as a presidential candidate who happened to be black but as the black presidential candidate. And his cause was new—for however he styled it, his cause was that of black separatism within the American political system.

Black separatism has old roots. But modern black leaders, the fathers who forced and won the civil rights revolution, had fought for a different course: full opportunity for and full participation of blacks within American politics. Roy Wilkins of the N.A.A.C.P. had felt equality must be won by law, through the courts. His triumph was 1954's watershed Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The prophetic Martin Luther King Jr. had gone beyond that: If the laws flouted morality, then morality and civil disobedience must change the laws. His triumph came in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Through the openings that they carved poured scores of black participants and winners at every level of American politics. From three black Congressmen in 1960, the numbers jumped to 21 in 1984; and in the blackening cities, mayoralties went to blacks in Los Angeles, Chicago,